Agent Use of Delegation and Interaction Traceability (AUDIT)
bofreq-kuhlewind-agent-use-of-delegation-and-interaction-traceability-audit-02

Document Type Proposed BOF request
Title Agent Use of Delegation and Interaction Traceability (AUDIT)
Last updated 2026-05-28
State Proposed
Editor Mirja Kühlewind
Responsible leadership
Send notices to (None)
bofreq-kuhlewind-agent-use-of-delegation-and-interaction-traceability-audit-02

Name: Agent Use of Delegation and Interaction Traceability (AUDIT)

Description

Autonomous and semi-autonomous software agents are increasingly acting on behalf of users across multiple services and administrative domains. The increased use of complex agent communications introduces significant challenges for auditability and accountability. Existing mechanisms, such as system logs, tracing systems, and authorization frameworks, capture individual aspects of system behavior but lack interoperable support for correlating user intent, delegation chains, authorization state, and resulting actions across domains. This creates challenges for fundamental questions required for compliance, operational debugging, and user trust, such as who initiated an action, under which authority it occurred, and how permissions evolved during execution.

The AUDIT effort aims to define interoperable protocol mechanisms and data models to enable auditing of complex, distributed, and time-evolving systems. This includes an architectural concept, common models for audit records, propagation of audit context across interactions, and integration with existing IETF protocols such as OAuth, HTTP, and attestation and transparency frameworks.

Required Details

  • Status: WG forming (proposed chairs: Yaroslav Rosomakho)
  • Responsible AD: SEC ADs
  • BOF proponents: Mirja Kühlewind <mirja.kuehlewind@ericsson.com>, Henk Birkholz <henk.birkholz@ietf.contact>, Pam Dingle <Pamela.Dingle@microsoft.com>
  • Number of people expected to attend: 100
  • Length of session (1 or usually 2 hours): 1.5-2 hours
  • Conflicts (whole Areas and/or WGs)
  • Chair Conflicts: TBD
  • Technology Overlap: OAUTH, WIMSE, SCITT, RATS, HTTPbis, Webbotauth
  • Key Participant Conflict: SPICE, IOTops, SCONE, MASQUE, QUIC, MAPRG, probably more...

Information for IAB/IESG

  • Any protocols or practices that already exist in this space:

    • OAuth 2.0 (Token Exchange for delegated authorization)
    • SCITT (transparency service)
    • RATS (remote attestation)
    • HTTP and W3C Trace Context (request correlation and propagation)
    • vCon (conversation record format)
    • WIMSE (workload identifiers)

  • Which (if any) modifications to existing protocols or practices are required:

    • Profiles for RATS and SCITT
    • Extensions to HTTP (conext header) and potentially oauth (conext in tokens)

  • Which (if any) entirely new protocols or practices are required:

    • Data model for records

  • Open source projects (if any) implementing this work:

    • Potentially logging frameworks like OpenTelemetry (TBD)

Agenda

  • Intro and Motivation (10 mins)
  • Architecture overview und use cases (20 mins)
  • Relation to other IETF work (10 mins)
  • Review of proposed charter and discussion (45 mins)